Ladies and, to a lesser extent, more ladies, I have discovered a band that I really wish I had known about all along. You know sometimes these kinds of groups just weren’t known before the internet, even if they were making modern-tinged music back in the 70’s, but no matter what the method, I am tickled chartreuse to have discovered Sparks:
I came across this band entirely by accident, whilst reading through the Wikipedia entry about Weird Al’s songs, I came across a fairly chuckle-worthy title from Straight Outta Lynwood (which I have spoken of previously) called “Virus Alert”, and upon reading it, I found out it was a “style parody” or “pastiche” of Sparks, so I figured what the heck, might as well look at Sparks on Wikipedia and Youtube and Zune Marketplace…
15 albums later, I am in love. What is it about Sparks that has “spark”-ed my interest? I’m glad I made you ask using a rhetorical question! For one, I noticed that they are a strong influence on some already influencial bands, one of which that caught my eye was my heroes, They Might Be Giants.
Indeed, like TMBG, Sparks is made up of two men, and one of them can play keyboard, and they have clever lyrics and New Wave elements to their sound at times, but there the similarities slow down. Sparks is two brothers, Ron and Russell Mael, who don’t really look much alike, and in fact have manufactured (???) a really interesting juxtaposition in their stage presence.
First we have Russell:
Russell is a man of many hairstyles, many sequined tuxedos, and a never-ending bounce to his step. He prances about on stage dressed in crazy glam attire as he sings Sparks songs, usually in a high falsetto caused in part perhaps by his tight, form-fitting pants. Russell’s stage persona is not unheard of, many frontmen of chipper music like this (especially glam rock) fall under this category, so the thing that makes Russell special is his ever-present brother Ron:
Ron’s job is to play the keyboard, which is a given since he wrote most of the songs, and indeed the melodies, as sung by his brother, are very strictly controlled by Ron’s right-hand keyboard melodies, almost like a Nazi regime, which gives a whole new meaning to the album being called Propaganda and, of course, his mustache. Ron stands perfectly still while playing, and has this very outstanding scowl (or, in the case of this picture, insane grin) that serves as the counter-point to Russell’s energetic performances. Of course, the odd occasion when Ron does do something besides look creepy are moments of pure gold, as he is quite the tap dancer, for instance.
Still, none of this works with these words I’ve been wasting on them, videos is clearly the way to present this band, and the reason I picked Propaganda, which it seems I’m going to actually talk about less and less, is because my favorite videos of what I’ve found so far are two songs from this very album, “Something For The Girl With Everything“, and “B.C.“, I recommend these videos so much that I’m temporarily lifting my hesitation to post Youtube videos in these write-ups, as I started to rely too heavily on them.
As you might can tell, the brothers not only has chipper, upbeat melodies throughout this, their early “glam-rock” period, but said melodies are complex, bordering on convoluted. So many chord changes and even a tempo change for “B.C.” are typical for Propaganda’s 11 tracks. The lyrics are clever, incurably strange, yet carefully crafted, surprisingly mostly by stoic brother Ron rather than flamboyant brother Russell, at least according to the guys’ own testimony. The album is high energy and catchy, electronic rifts throughout, without even a hint of slowdown.
There are some legitimate rocking-out portions of the album that would be stricken from the group’s latter releases, but as far as glam rock goes, you can hardly do better than “At Home At Work At Play”, which is more guitar-driven than keyboard, though Ron’s simple lines are ever-present.
The majority of the songs, however, are chipper, Queen-like songs, which makes sense because this was the time when Queen was just starting to get popular. However, due to the fact that the band was making this kind of music before Queen became popular begs the question “who begat whom”, if indeed any of this stuff was arrived at through contrivance. Personally, I think it’s just a coincidence, and I feel that Sparks is far removed from Queen in every respect except for the tinkly melodies, and there’s got to be some kind of difference between the two, because I have never really liked Queen.
Anyway, controversial statements aside, there is only song on Propaganda that I am not so crazy about, “Who Don’t Like Kids”, which is a pretty good song overall, but I kind of hate the presence of children in rock recordings (with exceptions, see my writeup of Sia, like, the second writeup on this whole blog). And no, song, it’s not that I don’t like kids, I just don’t like kids in song.
All in all, even with the one song I am on the fence about, I can’t deny that these songs were lovingly crafted, and through the repetitious melodies and choruses, there is usually a section of music that is revisited once or twice that just glows in the mix. It’s kind of different from rock music or any other standard style in that way, and I can see where New Wave bands and unique rock bands like They Might Be Giants got the idea, if indeed Sparks can be directly responsible for such a thing. A good example is in the song “Bon Voyage”, which is 5 minutes of what seems like 500 choruses, but interspersed between the usual bits are these micro bridges that change the song completely for a while.
I am also a sucker for tempo changes, and the song “B.C.” does that really well, but if you were a good reader and went back to check out those videos, you’ll see what I mean.
Either way, I have downloaded 15 of the band’s 21 albums, and will probably obtain the rest of them eventually. Expect to see this crazy band here in the future, here at Album Du Jour, where we don’t give two craps about publishing half of the article just to meet the deadline because we had a crappy day and phone calls with dear friends are the only way out of the blues. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s writeup!
